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Title: On Deck at Midnight
Author: kiltsandlollies
Fandom: Master & Commander
Disclaimer: Not at all mine, alas.
Notes: Present #1 for strawberryelfsp: A Bonden vignette, not entirely book or movie canon, but with touches of both. SPOILERS for the movie.

It’s terribly quiet up here, and Barrett Bonden would have it no other way.

Barrett’s volunteered for this extra midnight shift on deck three times this week. It’s not because he necessarily wants to be up here, gazing at the moon and stars, appealing at that may be. It’s not even only that he does not want to be below deck, curled up tight in his little hammock, trying to rest while ten feet down the row, one of the young able seamen is crying quietly in the dark, keeping his sobs down while everyone else sleeps.

Barrett knows that the tears will stop eventually. The fellow’s a hard little bastard, though he’s younger than Barrett by at least six or seven years. He’s just received his first real taste of what the sea can do, that’s all. She can take your friends, take your ship, take you—and you love her for it. You love her power and her grace and her—Barrett searches for the word, and finds it hard to conjure in his head—feroci, ferocish, fiercity?—ferocity.

Barrett squints into the darkness, searching even now for the phantom ship that is tormenting his beloved Captain. He fears the loss of his sight more than he does the loss of hearing, of limbs, of life. Without his eyes, Barrett’s not much of a coxswain, no helmsman, no lookout. Even the little Lord who will take Barrett’s place on watch in another fifteen minutes stands proud and ready to fight with one arm, but without eyes, no man is useful aboard this ship. And to not be useful to the Captain or this crew would be close enough to death for Barrett that it makes him shiver, more than the wind ever could.

Still, there is more at work here than Barrett’s worries over his eyes, great though they are. Barrett is up here now, alone and watching his own breath puff out all pretty–like in cloudy shapes before dissipating like the mists, because sleep is not coming easily or well.

His dreams—his nightmares—of late have been full of fire, of burns.

They begin with his hands. They’re already what any land–grown, land–sown person would call horrible—all scarred, reddened by the wind and saltwater, calloused from years of work getting to know every inch of the Surprise—but this feeling is different. It begins with the feeling of rope sliding in Barrett’s palms, slow and gentle at first, hardly—percept, perceivy, pericepti?—noticeable. Then it sharpens, quickens as the rope does, whipping through his skin and between his fingers when he tries to steady the fiber and keep it from flying out of his hands and cracking across his face. And then, oh then, it’s much worse, because then the rope is flying out, cut loose by the Captain’s desperate, angry hands on the axe, and it blisters Barrett’s skin so deeply he can almost smell smoke, feel licking tongues of flame in his palms. He hasn’t had to release the ropes for years, but the events of only a few days ago have caused him to relive every time he’d done so in the past.

Now, here, awake and wide–eyed once more, Barrett curls his fingers around the handles of the helm, coaxing the Surprise so carefully from one wave to the next that not a man above or below would know if he released the wheel and went walking off the side of the boat into nothingness. Which of course he has considered more than once in his life on this ship, but not anytime in the last few years. Not when he has this responsibility, this duty to his Captain.

If the images ceased with his hands, Barrett could bear them. But they do not. No, the next thing to burn is the helm itself, with his hands still clenched around it, while Pullings tries vainly to drag him backward and away onto a dinghy and into a new life on another ship. It is strange to Barrett that he does not feel the pain when the fire spreads to cover his hands in these dreams. After the rope, Barrett imagines that any further abuse of his skin would feel just murderous—a good word, one he learned from the Captain—but it does not. What Barrett does feel instead is something he cannot yet put a name to, and does not want to ask anyone, not even the doctor, because if you give something a word, a name, doesn’t it make it real? So in his dreams, Barrett refuses to let go of the burning helm, even as the wood crackles and warps and his own skin chars, and together he and the wood make noises that have sometimes woken Barrett up to find his hands clapped over his ears tight like those of a disobedient child ignoring his mother.

But of course the helm is not burning now, not now that Barrett’s hands and voice both caress the wood. He does not sing when anyone else is about, but here in the middle of the night it pleases him very much to hum to himself and remember songs of good cheer and breezes and the touch of something and someone more than Her, that great expanse of water and love and fear he watches in the dark. He is no musician—leave that to the doctor and the Captain and the men with better voices—but Barrett can appreciate the rhymes and the steady, raucous clapping and the pretty sounds drawn from wood and wire, from horsehair and hide.

It is never worse than when Barrett turns in his sleep and feels hot, so terribly hot all over and smells smoke again, this time everywhere. It seeps into his throat and skin and lungs, making him cough—sometimes enough that it earns him a kick from the next fellow over in the darkness below—and forcing him out of his hammock to find that the ship is burning. The Surprise is falling into ash and smouldering metal. Barrett runs past other souls more frightened than himself , runs like there is no tomorrow—because it’s likely there will not be—to the Captain’s quarters. Even as he runs, brushing epauleted shoulders and knocking expansive hat brims, Barrett remembers to salute, remembers not to show his fear.

And then it happens.

Barrett can see his Captain struggling mightily in the smoke to reach the next quarters, those of the doctor, and the Captain turns quickly, shouting at Barrett to get above, to judge the damage and to help Pullings bring everyone but a few strong lads to the deck, where they will be safer. Barrett never hears the command to return below, to help put out the fires himself, but in his dream he always promises to do just that. But of course it does not come to pass that way, because the very moment Barrett has rounded up several men to accop, accom, accompanimi—join him, the noise, the incredible noise behind him makes him turn and he is faced with what he’s heard other men call a ball of fire. And then it is the only time in any of his dreams that Barrett really hears his own voice.

It shames Barrett beyond anything he can measure that the only sound he makes before he dies is a scream.

He inhales sharply when the little Lord draws up close to him and smiles, nodding in childlike salute. Barrett salutes back by rote and releases the wheel with a touch of blessing both on the wood itself and on the boy’s shoulder before he turns to return below. Perhaps tonight he will find sleep, and these dreams will die away as so many other have before. It’s rare that he dreams at all, and Barrett imagines that with a little more time, they will indeed disappear.

He makes his way through the still–darkened cabins, smiling at familiar snores and touching the wooden beams in odd, lucky places as he goes. He’s almost at his own section of the sleeping areas when he encounters another man, one who usually sleeps far better than Barrett himself but who now appears considerably worse off. He salutes immediately, and Hollom nods, his gaze moving from side to side and never directly at Barrett.

And as Hollom passes, Barrett can smell smoke.

Hollom is burning, from the inside out, like the rope, like the helm, like the ship—but this fire is real, and one that only Hollom himself can douse. While the other men have hissed at Hollom’s back, called him everything from their curse to things Barrett cannot define, Barrett has said nothing to either side, nothing in either’s defense. There is nothing he felt he could say, perhaps, until now.

“Sir ...” he whispers, only loud enough that Hollom will hear.

“You’re to sleep, Bonden,” Hollom answers, his voice shaking.

It is a command, and one Barrett cannot disobey. He nods and climbs into the hammock, waiting, waiting forever for what he knows will come. And he is the first to rise when the little Lord’s scream carries down into the darkness, the first to pull the boy away from the edge of the deck, the first to meet the Captain’s eyes as he rushes up from his quarters.

No, sleep will not come easily or well to Bonden tonight, no more than it has for the past week. But it will come again, as sure as the fires and the burns will come before.

As sure as tomorrow night will find Barrett again in the terrible quiet.

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